TY  - JOUR
A1  - Uygun, Serkan
A1  - Clahsen, Harald
T1  - Morphological processing in heritage speakers
T2  - Bilingualism : language and cognition
N2  - Previous research has shown that heritage speakers struggle with inflectional morphology. 'Limitations of online resources' for processing a non-dominant language has been claimed as one possible reason for these difficulties. To date, however, there is very little experimental evidence on real-time language processing in heritage speakers. Here we report results from a masked priming experiment with 97 bilingual (Turkish/German) heritage speakers and a control group of 40 non-heritage speakers of Turkish examining regular and irregular forms of the Turkish aorist. We found that, for the regular aorist, heritage speakers use the same morphological decomposition mechanism ('affix stripping') as control speakers, whereas for processing irregularly inflected forms they exhibited more variability (i.e., less homogeneous performance) than the control group. Heritage speakers also demonstrated semantic priming effects. At a more general level, these results indicate that heritage speakers draw on multiple sources of information for recognizing morphologically complex words.
KW  - Turkish
KW  - morphology
KW  - aorist
KW  - priming
KW  - variability
KW  - processing
Y1  - 2020
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/56852
SN  - 1366-7289
SN  - 1469-1841
VL  - 24
IS  - 3
SP  - 415
EP  - 426
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - Cambridge
ER  -